d Tintagil and Caerleon in the interest of the
cultured classes long before the beginning of the fifteenth century;
when Poggio, in the very midst of the classic revival, still told of the
comically engrossed audience which surrounded the vagabonds singing of
Orlando and Rinaldo. The effete Arthurian cycle, superseded in Spain and
France by the Amadis romances, was speedily forgotten in Italy; but the
Carolingian stories remained; and when Italian poetry arose once more
after the long interregnum between Petrarch and Lorenzo dei Medici, and
looked about for subjects, it laid its hand upon them. But when, in the
second half of the fifteenth century, those old tales of Charlemagne
received, after so many centuries of alterations and ephemeral
embodiments, that artistic form which the Middle Ages had been unable to
give them, the stories themselves, and the way in which they were
regarded, were totally different from what they had been in the time of
Theroulde, or of the anonymous author of "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" the
Renaissance, with its keen artistic sense, made out of the Carolingian
tales real works of art, but works of art which were playthings. To
begin with, the Carolingian stories had been saturated with Arthurian
colour: they had been furnished with all the knight-rrantry, all the
gallantry, all the enchantments, the fairies, giants, and necromancers
of the Keltic legends; and, moreover, they had lost, by infinite
repetition, all the political realism and meaning so striking in "The
Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" a confusion and
unreality further increased by the fact that the Italians had no
original connection with those tales, that to them real men and plans
were no better than imaginary ones, and that the minstrels who sang in
the market-place, and the laborious prose-writers who compiled such
collections as that called of the "Reali di Francia," were equally free
in their alterations and adaptations, creating unknown relationships,
inventing new adventures, suppressing essential historical points, with
no object save amusing their audience or readers with new stories about
familiar heroes. Such was the condition of the stories themselves. The
attitude of the public towards them was, by the middle of the fifteenth
century, one of complete incredulity and frivolous amusement; the
paladins were as unreal as the heroes of any granny's fairy tale. The
people wanted to hear of wonderful battles and